Paradox's rival to The Sims urges players to take minimum PC requirements "seriously"

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you're a fan of The Sims 4 and your ears pricked up during this month's reveal of Paradox Interactive's upcoming life sim Life By You, you might want to check your PC's specifications before it enters early access later this year. During a chat with Paradox Tectonic's general manager Rod Humble at this year's GDC, I spoke to him about whether there was any plan to accommodate lower-end PC specifications when Life By You enters early access this September, and he answered by urging players to take its minimum PC specifications "seriously".

"Our aim was to make a well running, open AAA high-end life simulator first and foremost, so our min specs reflect that," Humble tells me. "Once we get it running, we can look at whether there are ways we can optimise it to bring it down. But out of the gate, I would strongly urge people to look at the min specs and take them seriously. If you're going to play the game, you're going to need a good gaming PC."

In fairness, Humble himself says Life By You already runs "great" on his own high-end gaming laptop, but stresses that "our emphasis is not to make it work on all hardware". Rather, it's to make "the best game we possibly can". That will probably come as disappointing news to current Sims players still hanging onto their decade-old hardware, but Humble says it's all in the name of longevity in the long run.

"We want this game to last for as long as we can," he says. "Not just so we don't have to rebuild this thing so many times. But also because we want players to be able to lean on this game and know that what they make is going to last."

In fairness, the current minimum GPU requirements for Life By You are fairly tame, with its Steam page listing 2015's Nvidia GeForce GTX